This week’s roundup of “How To” articles, educational resources and upcoming events, business news and success stories recommended by SBE Council President & CEO Karen Kerrigan.
OPERATIONS AND MANAGEMENT
Forget CEO: It’s Time Small Business Owners Became Chief Growth Officers, Forbes. “If you discover the secret to growth, you can call yourself anything you want. It’s like striking gold, winning the lottery. But the cool thing is we now know about some key activities that almost always lead to growth in business.
6 Growth Slow Downs that Can Quickly Lead to Disaster, Startup Professionals. “To sustain long-term growth, every company needs to build a repeatable process for innovation and finding new opportunities before their core business growth disappears.”
Growth Hacking: How to Grow Your Small Business Faster, Crowd Spring. “Small business guru Michael Gerber offers business owners this piece of wisdom: Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business. So, let’s avoid that pitfall.”
Small Business IT: Starting Off On the Right Foot, Bplans. “It’s about avoiding headaches as you grow Most of us have spent a large part of our lives using computers at home, school, university, and the workplace, without ever really thinking about what our “strategy” is. We just switch it on and start using it to get things done. This attitude is fine in many situations, but if it’s how you manage your IT needs in a new business.”
Updated Withholding Calculator, Form W-4 Released, IRS. (Pass it on to your employees!) “The Internal Revenue Service today released an updated Withholding Calculator on IRS.gov and a new version of Form W-4 to help taxpayers check their 2018 tax withholding following passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December. The IRS urges taxpayers to use these tools to make sure they have the right amount of tax taken out of their paychecks.”
Upcoming Webinars
Cybersecure My Business Webinar: Know What Recovery Looks Like
National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA)
March 13, 2018
2:00-3:00 p.m. ET
Join NCSA and our partners to learn about how to recover from a cyber incident. Resources are available to help you improve the cybersecurity of your business. Visit staysafeonline.org for more information.
Click here for more information and to register.
SCORE LIVE Webinar: Three Ways to Boost Your Bottom Line
March 15, 2018
1:00 p.m. ET
Do you ever feel like you’re overwhelmed and scared to take a serious look at the numbers side of your business? In this webinar produced by SCORE, a resource partner of the U.S. Small Business Administration, you will learn:
- The relationship between prosperity thinking and poverty thinking
- The difference between profits and cash
- How the timing of inflows and outflows of money affects your business
- How to have your business money serve your personal life
BRANDING AND MARKETING
Powerful Branding Lessons From the World’s Best Brands (That Actually Work for Your Small Business, CrowdSpring. “It’s true that large, multinational companies have huge budgets, thousands of employees, marketing agencies, and often, decades of experience. But branding is about experience and emotion and the psychology of branding doesn’t care about the size of the company.”
5 Things Not to do With Your Generational Marketing, Small Biz Daily. “Are you in tune with what different generations of shoppers want? Probably not: A recent survey reports marketers are often off base about what matters most to different generations.”
Custom Website vs. Template: Which is Right For You?, Web.com. “Here are some factors to consider when making your choice.”
25 Ways to Help Another Small Business Owner, Work Better Not Harder. “When we help each other, we all grow stronger!”
Startups and Entrepreneurship
6 Mindset Elements Required for Disruptive Startups, Startup Professionals. “If you are a new entrepreneur, you can still choose to “play it safe” with incremental innovation to improve your initial funding chances, but getting funding won’t be very satisfying if you can’t compete, and lose it all.”
Where to Sell Arts, Crafts and Designs Online, Bplans. “According to the Hiscox Online Art Trade Report of 2017, the online art market rose 15 percent to $3.75 billion in 2016. Studies show that by 2021, it could be worth about $9.14 billion. This is great news for artists and crafters who are thinking about starting to sell their work online.”
The 5 Most Profitable Industries for Small Business Owners in 2018, Fundera. “If you’re determined to start your own business, you probably know at least these two things for sure: you want to be your own boss, and you want to make a profit. Are you still trying to find the right business idea for you?”
MARKETS
America’s Fastest-Growing Cities 2018, Forbes. “The goal of Forbes’ annual list of America’s fastest-growing cities is to give a holistic picture of places on the upswing. That means looking not just at job, population or output growth individually, but considering how these important measures and others come together.”
Pet Obsessed Millennials Pamper Their “Fur Babies,” Small Biz Labs. “And a lot of them have pets. Three-fourths of Americans in their 30s own a dog and over half own a cat, compared to 50 percent of the overall population with dogs, and 35 percent with cats. This is, of course, good news for the pet industry because millennials have passed baby boomers as our nation’s largest demographic cohort.”
Ready to Grow Your International Business? Find the Right Market – Video Series, International Trade Administration, Department of Commerce. A new CS video series can help you identify markets for your business’s growing export strategy. Each year, thousands of U.S. companies find new customers and trade partners abroad with help from CS global trade professionals. Among the series of Export Destination video shorts covering 20 high-profile market destinations, there is a sub-group of 10 markets for you to consider. These markets may be less crowded with foreign competitors, while still offering high-growth opportunities.
POLICY AND POLITICS
Is Your State Friendly to Small Business? Check out SBE Council’s Small Business Policy Index 2018, released this past week. How does your state stack up?
Back From the Dead: NLRB’s Vague and Expansive “Joint Employer” Standard, SBE Council. “Instability of joint employer is a major cloud that overhangs small businesses and harms entrepreneurship, the health of the franchise industry, and many if not most b-to-b relationships.”
New Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum Imports Mean Higher Costs for Many Small Businesses, SBE Council. “The impact of these new taxes will impact entrepreneurs, small businesses and workers in a wide range of industries that use steel and aluminum, such as in construction, assorted consumer goods manufacturers, and the makers of capital goods, like tools, machinery, equipment and a host of other products. Many of these sectors will become less competitive in the global marketplace.”
SUCCESS AND INSPIRATION
The Exclusive Insider Story of Ring: From ‘Shark Tank’ Reject to Amazon’s Latest Acquisition, Forbes. “Just four years ago, Ring, then called DoorBot, was living on fumes. After a series of hit-and-miss ventures, Siminoff had retreated to his Pacific Palisades garage with a couple of buddies to try to invent a new product.”
IQ is Not Fixed at Birth: Habits Not Genetics Determines IQ, Property Update. “If you forge daily habits that increase the size of your axons, number of dendrites and the synapses inside your brain, your IQ will grow. Good habits, therefore, can grow your IQ throughout your entire life. Conversely, bad habits can cause your IQ to decrease during your lifetime.”
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